Recently started looking into self hosted photo gallery and storage. I see almost all of the options are utilizing docker now.

At first, I was very reluctant to use docker is because I dont understand it and it thought it has the performance penalty that similar to full fledged VM.

I was wrong! Very wrong. Not only the performance hit is way lesser than VM and the ease of deploying whatever services you want is insane.

There is one issue that bugs me for quite sometime is that, when I run multiple docker instances on the same Pi server, I need to separate all those instances into different ports. And I hate it! I dont want to rmb which port is for which service and I dont want to open up all those ports from my router.

I can solve the second problem easily by connecting a VPN all the time, so that I dont need to open any ports from my router. It works well, but not the best solution.

After some digging, I found something called reverse proxy. It is exactly what I wanted to solve the first problem. There are many ways to setup reverse proxy, I can do it by manually modifying my existing Nginx config and redirect whatever I want. But that is just too troublesome and tedious, I want something more easier and quick. Then I found Nginx Proxy Manager, it has really nice webUI but I cant figure out how to setup reverse proxy… and finally I found Caddy!

I found it from a Reddit post, all the settings are done by very simple syntax. I gave it a try on my phone and just wanna see how well it runs on my Pi. And Oh my god, I got the reverse proxy to run all done ON MY PHONE terminal!

Ok, I’m sold. Time to migrate my Pi server to a docker + Caddy setup!

50% sales is on, and I finally bought it! I hope they can continue to be a one time purchase app that I can keep using for as long as I like.

I always think that any deal that is too good to be true is a scam or something. I didnt know this CDKeys.com is selling legit keys and redeemable from Steam. Oh man, time to buy a few more games. 😂

Finally Bitwarden enabled the Passkey support on phone. It is time to move all the login to passkey.

My mini pc has been crashing whenever Im gaming on it or running some heavy apps like VMWare since the day I received it.

At first, I thought it was due to the heat that caused the system to freeze since the mini pc doesn’t have a as good air flow. But the crash is happening more and more often, so I decided to debug a bit and see what is actually going on.

Im using Arch Linux as my main OS. I suspected it could be some bleeding edge softwares that causing the system to crash, especially the latest Mesa. Since the system only crash when Im gaming on it, I thought it might be due to GPU driver instability or something. So I restored my Windows 11 from backup and see whether Im still having the system crash issue.

And it does! The issue still happens again! Only then I started to think it could be HW issue. I then started running some system stability stress test using OCCT as Im on Windows. I tried SSD test, GPU test, both were running fine for an hour without crashing. Only when I stress test the RAMs, the system crashes only after few mins of testing. Didnt expect RAM was the issue.. after replacing it, my system finally not crashing anymore.

What an interesting debug. 😂